To parents, youth sports an 'athletic arms race'

Yet even he was floored when a couple of moms he met at a pro junior golf tournament told him that their teen daughters would be entered in 30 such events this past summer.

"Why are these young ladies out on the golf course playing competitively four or five days a week?" Worthy asked himself.

His own 16-year-old daughter, Soleil, holds down a job while participating in a few tournaments each summer. She and the other young women are good, Worthy says, maybe talented enough to play in college.

But 30 tournaments?

"If you're a future Olympian, I get it. But for these kids who will never reach that level, that's what I don't get," says Worthy, a professor at Metropolitan State University of Denver with an interest in sports psychology.

"What does it say about our culture that we go to this extreme?" he asks. "And that we push our kids to this extreme?"

It's not just golf. Many parents, coaches and researchers see a steady upping of the ante in youth sports, with kids whose families can afford the time and cost involved in playing more, practicing more and specializing in one sport at younger ages.

Parents are driven by a desire to help their children stand out and the fear that, if they don't, their kids will be left behind.

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To keep pace, they're often traveling hundreds if not thousands of miles a year for games and tournaments. Some parents send their children to personal trainers, or to the growing number of so-called elite training facilities that have opened in recent years.

Often, the goal is to simply land a spot on the local high school team, an accomplishment once taken for granted. Or, a young person may try to get on the roster in the growing private club team system -- an even more exclusive route that some top teenage athletes are choosing, especially when high schools cut coaches and opportunities.

"It sort of spreads throughout the community and then it reduces down in age," VanderStoep says. "If it's OK for 14-year-olds, then it's OK for a 12-year-old, or a 10-year-old."

How can this obsession with playing sports exist in a country where the Centers for Disease Control say more than a third of young Americans are overweight or obese? The juxtaposition seems unlikely, but a longstanding survey from the National Sporting Goods Association found that youth participation in most team sports has steadily dropped in the last decade.

The number of 12- to 17-year-olds who played baseball in any kind of setting has, for instance, dropped 36 percent from 2001 to 2011, according to the survey. Basketball participation has dropped nearly 20 percent. Swimming and tackle football each dropped about 10 percent, volleyball participation 2 percent and soccer 1.4 percent.

Nonetheless, it would be oversimplifying to say the United States has become a nation of couch potatoes. Experts who track youth sports say many young people simply don't have the chance to play, or resources to do so.

Some schools in cash-strapped districts have cut back on sports and physical education. And even in some wealthier districts, high school populations have grown, leaving more kids to vie for fewer roster spots.

An annual survey by the National Federation of State High School Associations shows that, in the new millennium, the number of student athletes has grown because the overall youth population also has steadily increased. But if you divide the number of athletes who play a particular sport by the number of schools, comparing 2000 to 2010, roster sizes in some sports have actually shrunk -- by an average of at least one athlete per school per sport in such games as basketball, soccer, baseball and volleyball.

These dwindling opportunities have only fed the hyper-competitive atmosphere, says VanderStoep, who admits that, as a dad of two daughters who play volleyball, even he feels beholden to the system.

For his daughters, that has meant weight-lifting camps and tournaments, and seemingly endless required practices and packed schedules. Games could be any night of the week -- and that has made it more difficult for his youngest daughter to find the time to play other sports.

"You feel obligated to do it. You want to give your kids the opportunity," he says. "And if they don't show up, they lose opportunities to play."

Corinne Henson, a mom in suburban Chicago, knows about those hard choices. Her sons, 11-year-old Tyler and 14-year-old Dylan, play year-round baseball on different traveling teams and also manage to squeeze in basketball and football for their local park district.

The boys do it because they love it -- live for it, really.

"I wouldn't give up sports for anything," Dylan says as he sits on the couch in his living room waiting for football practice to start.

"Me either," his younger brother quickly adds.

But there are sacrifices, especially for their parents. Time spent on sports has meant giving up their longtime campsite in Indiana where they'd kept a travel trailer. They simply have no time to go there.

"Our vacations are baseball trips," Henson says. She figures they spend several thousand dollars a year on travel, team fees and equipment. Often, one parent is taking Dylan to one game or practice, while the other parent carts Tyler to the other.

When they were younger, their boys regularly missed birthday parties and other events because of games. But the most difficult decision came earlier this year, when Dylan's best friend was struck and injured by a hit-and-run driver.

Their town, Oak Forest, Ill., had a fundraiser for the friend in July. But Dylan, a catcher who is captain of his traveling baseball team, had four tournament games that day. He decided he had to be at the tournament, and showed up at the fundraiser as it was wrapping up.

His friend understood. "I would have done the same thing," he told Dylan. The traveling team won the tournament, likely because Dylan stayed, his mom says.

"But it's so hard, as a parent."

Diane Hughes, a mom in New Jersey, also knows that many outsiders would look at her 10-year-old son's travel-team baseball schedule and shake their heads.

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